Thursday, August 18, 2011

Hot yoga

Why do we as humans have the need to entangle ourselves with the most uncomfortable and painful situations/environments on purpose is something that I vow to one day write a thesis on (these parenthesis serve no purpose other than to not end a sentence with a preposition). There is nothing that man wouldn’t do (by man I mean the humanoid species and not your neighbor from 5F). I count myself as one of the greats who dared to climb Mt. Everest or swim the Suez Canal or cross the Bermuda Triangle and reappear in the US-European rectangle. What gives me the right to belong to this special group? I take hot yoga. Let me present my argument before being booed (love this word) out of my blog. Any kind of exercise is brutal, on this we can all agree. The bodybuilders of the world who pretend to enjoy every minute of the excruciating pain they feel while lifting a ton can kiss my 15-lb lifting behind. I see your veins ready to burst and I see the sheer horror in your eyes and I always get the eerie feeling that you walk around with a little piece of your lower intestine sticking out of your ahole (pardon the visual but I had to go there) so what’s there to grin about? Getting back to my amazing abilities (which as we just saw do not lie in the weightlifting department). Yoga is a very tricky sport/religion/way of life. You can be a true yogi and devote yourself completely to this uncomfortable practice or you can be a pretend yogi and come to class just to lose some weight. I realize my previous statement makes it that much more difficult to equate myself with the likes of anyone who accomplished anything but bear with me. I come to class with every intention of sweating out the demons and freeing my mind. Unfortunately what ends up happening is me tapping my feet to the beat of the meditation music and staring out the window (in my defense the view is fantastic) while scrunched up in some hideous pose. My instructor tells me that I if I insist on looking out the window the least I can do is notice the reflections of other students and the pose they’re in so that I can assume the same one. OK, I may not be the best and most dedicated yogi out there but the mere fact that I drag my overweight self to a class 30 min away from my house almost daily says a lot. I also have days where I push myself so hard that I do feel like I’m about to float out of my body and teach the darn class myself to myself. At (never start with a preposition either I know) this point I’d like to mention that the yoga class I take is HOT yoga. As if getting into tree pose and breathing like you’re in a Lamaze class isn’t hard enough, lets turn the radiator on to 100 degrees and see how well you fare. Basically to get an understanding of what it feels like I urge all the naysayers to go to a banya (sauna/steam room in Russian) and do yoga. The word perspiration does not even begin to cover the amount of water dripping off of me. I happen to know that the quantity of liquid I take in is way less than the buckets I accumulate by the end of each class so I can possibly be liquefying from the inside. I am also proud to say that I have managed to get myself into somewhat of a head stand (my instructor holds my legs up of course). Everyone take note: this is what I call struggle, sacrifice and pushing yourself to the limit, even if that limit includes checking your red, sweaty face out in the window once in a while.

last year summed up

If someone told me a year ago that I’d be switching “professions” I would’ve laughed in their face and continued my slow and painful decline into single and unemployed middle age, but it just so happened. The story began a year ago when I up and decided that I no longer want to do what I am doing and that life has no meaning, yatta yatta. Can anyone guess what happens to an employee when they show up to work on a daily basis all disheveled and with a facial expression that screams louder than DMX to move and get out the way? I’ll tell ya. You get 3 months probation, no responsibilities, a nice severance package and a touching good-bye letter managing to somehow conceal the fact that you are fired. Breaking up is one thing but being informed that your services are no longer in the highest of demands and that the train you’ve been taking is about to have one less passenger on it, in an it’s not you it’s me way is certainly a feat to accomplish. Kudos to HR!
The most memorable day for me was the day after my last day of work. I woke up realizing there is nowhere that I need to be on this particular weekday and fell back asleep (which if you ask me is time well spent when it’s summer and you live by the beach). I woke up just in time to convince myself that this day I will remember forever because it marks the first day of the rest of my life (not to be confused with all the birthdays that my best friend and I decided to remember forever but only managed to remember one). Well my day was a special (July 1st? I think) day and even though I slept through most of it there will always be a special place in my heart for it (although I have plans to replace it with the day after I lose my next job). But enough sentimentality.
Fast forward a year and I am once again gainfully employed. I can’t say that my attitude about life has changed at all but I did realize that there is no way that someone with such an outlook can stay in the same place for longer than a year. The minute you want to build gallows in the lunch room that can hold up to 80 bodies (give or take a few), you need to start with the man in the mirror and make that change (to the next office/career/country/relationship, lucky enough to have you).